ARTICLES
Global warming and Popullation
The Ozone Layer and Climate Change
Global warming: blame the forests
Mass Pollution of Earth's Oceans Reaches Alarming Levels
Climate plan: Civilization must rise to the challenge
 An international panel of scientists presented the United Nations with a sweeping, detailed plan on Tuesday to combat climate change -- a challenge, it said, "to which civilization must rise." Failure would produce a turbulent 21st century of weather extremes, spreading drought and disease, expanding oceans and displaced coastal populations, it said. "The increasing numbers of environmental refugees as sea levels rise and storm surges increase will be in the tens of millions," panel co-chair Rosina Bierbaum, a University of Michigan ecologist, told reporters here.
After a two-year study, the 18-member group, representing 11 nations, offered scores of recommendations: from pouring billions more dollars into research and development of cleaner energy sources, to mobilizing U.N. and other agencies to help affected people, to winning political agreement on a global temperature "ceiling."
The IPCC expressed its greatest confidence yet that global warming is being caused largely by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mostly from man's burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. If nothing's done, it said, global temperatures could rise as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Temperatures rose an average 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years. Tuesday's report said the world's nations should agree to limit further rises this century to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
While emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants are increasing in booming Asian economies like India and China, "most of the environmental degradation that has happened has been historically caused by ... the industrial world," said Munir Akram, Pakistan's U.N. ambassador and chairman of the Group of 77, an organization grouping 132 mainly developing countries and China.
The experts panel said global carbon dioxide emissions should be leveled off by 2015-2020, and then cut back to less than one-third that level by 2100, via a vast transformation of global energy systems -- toward greater efficiency, away from fossil fuels, and toward biofuels, solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.
The White House points to what it says is spending of almost $3 billion a year on energy-technology research and development as its major contribution to combatting climate change. But Holdren said other calculations put spending at under $2 billion, and it's "far from proportionate to either the size of the challenge or the size of the opportunities."
In fact, the experts panel urged governments to immediately ban all new coal-fired power plants except those designed for eventual retrofitting of sequestration technology. The panel's other co-chair is biodiversity expert Peter H. Raven, Missouri Botanical Garden director and past president of Sigma Xi. Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Global Warming and Population
 A “Malthusian” theory about the relationship between population growth and the environment suggests that as populations grow, they will strip their resources leading to famine, hunger and environmental degradation. As detailed further in this site’s section on , that is an oversimplification and has largely shown not to be true. Instead, it has been factors such as politics and economics (i.e. how we use our resources and for what purpose) that has determined environmental degradation or sustainability.
For example, the world’s wealthiest 20% (i.e. the rich countries) consume approximately 80% of the world’s resources, while the rest of humanity shares the other 20% of resource consumed, as noted in the section of this web site. In regards to climate change, countries with large populations such as China and India have not been the countries contributing greenhouse gases for the decades that has been required to trigger climate change, as noted further above. While in total amounts their emissions might be high (China is second largest emitter after the United States, for example), per person, their emissions are significantly smaller as noted earlier.
The atmosphere of course doesn’t “care” so to speak, but from the perspective of international relations, this is important: As stated above, penalizing developing countries for the problem mostly caused by the rich countries is not seen as fair by the developing world and so they will understandably resist demands by Bush, Blair and others to meet the same types of targets as industrialized nations.
An additional concern however, is that as countries such as China, India and Brazil grow in prosperity, there will be large populations with purchasing power, consuming more goods and services, thus making more demands on the planet. Indeed, many environmentalists have constantly noted that if such countries were to follow the style of development that the rich countries used and emulate them, then our planet may not be able to cope much longer.
Yet, as also noted in this site’s population section, researchers have found that . These ranges are ridiculously wide: from 2 billion to 147 billion people! Why such variance? It depends on how efficiently resources are used and for what purpose (i.e. economics). There are concerns, however, that many developing countries are pursuing the same path to development that the current industrialized countries have, which involved many environmentally damaging practices. Ironically much of the advise and encouragement to follow this path comes from the western economic schools of thought. There is therefore an urgent need to focus on cleaner technologies and an alternative path to a more sustainable form of development.
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The Ozone Layer and Climate Change
 EScientists believe that Global Warming will lead to a Ozone layer, because as the surface temperature rises, the stratosphere (the Ozone layer being found in the upper part) will get colder, making the natural repairing of the Ozone slower. NASA, for example, that by 2030, "climate change may surpass chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the main driver of overall ozone loss."
The Ozone layer protects all life on Earth from the harmful effects of the Sun's rays. It has been depleting for many years now. Scientists have said that currently over Antarctica the Ozone hole is and growing. Also, according to scientists, of the ozone layer blanketing the Arctic Circle was lost in the 1999/2000 winter. Also, September 9 to 10, 2000, the ozone hole . It was in Punta Arenas, a southern Chile city of about 120,000 people, exposing residents to very high levels of ultra violet radiation.
The ozone depletion has also been correlated with higher levels of cancer in humans and animals.
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Global Warming : Blame the Forest
 They have long been thought of as the antidote to harmful greenhouse gases, sufferers of, rather than contributors to, the effects of global warming. But in a startling discovery, scientists have realised that plants are part of the problem. According to a study published today, living plants may emit almost a third of the methane entering the Earth's atmosphere.
The result has come as a shock to climate scientists. "This is a genuinely remarkable result," said Richard Betts of the climate change monitoring organisation the Hadley Centre. "It adds an important new piece of understanding of how plants interact with the climate." Methane is second only to carbon dioxide in contributing to the greenhouse effect. "For a given mass of methane, it is a stronger greenhouse gas, but the reason it is of less concern is that there's less of it in the atmosphere," said Dr Betts.
But the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has almost tripled in the last 150 years, mainly through human-influenced so-called biogenic sources such as the rise in rice cultivation or numbers of flatulent ruminating animals. According to previous estimates, these sources make up two-thirds of the 600m tonnes worldwide annual methane production.
David Lowe, of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, said the new work, published in Nature, is important for two reasons. "First, because the methane emissions they document occur under normal physiological conditions, in the presence of oxygen, rather than through bacterial action in anoxic environments," he wrote in an accompanying article. "Second, because the estimated emissions are large, constituting 10-30% of the annual total of methane entering Earth's atmosphere."
Biogenic methane has traditionally been assumed to come from organic materials as they decompose in oxygen-free environments. But Dr Keppler found plants emit the gas even in normal, oxygen-rich surroundings: between 10 and 1,000 times more methane than dead plant material. When the plants were exposed to the sun, the rate of methane production increased. "Until now all the textbooks have said that biogenic methane can only be produced in the absence of oxygen," Dr Keppler said. "For that simple reason, nobody looked closely at this."The discovery sheds further light on the complex relationship between greenhouse gases and the environment. "If you're after predictions of global average temperature, it won't make a huge amount of difference," said Dr Betts. "But it shows how complicated it is to exactly quantify reforesting or deforesting in comparison with current fossil fuel emissions."
In addition, the new research could help to explain the source of plumes of methane observed by satellites over tropical forests. "The sheer biomass of the forest may be a factor there," said Dr Mahli. The fact that plants produce methane does not mean that planting forests is a bad idea, however. "Putting a tree where there was no tree before locks up a lot of carbon and this [new research] perhaps reduces the overall benefit of that by a fraction," said Dr Mahli.
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Mass Pollution of Earth's Oceans Reaches Alarming Levels
 The health of the world's oceans is being destroyed by human beings, and a new group called the Seaweed Rebels wants to do something about it. It's all part of the so-called "blue movement" that hopes to raise awareness of the destruction now being dished out onto the oceans by mankind.
So just what is mankind doing to destroy the oceans? For starters, by polluting our rivers and streams, we are indirectly polluting the oceans. All the toxic waste products, the heavy metals, pesticide runoff, and other toxins that go into our rivers ultimately empty into the ocean. The Mississippi river, for example, even though it starts out as clean, pristine waters in the Rocky Mountains, ends up becoming a polluted, toxic soup by the time it flushes into the Gulf of Mexico.
We also pollute our ocean waters in many other ways -- we pollute them with sound pollution thanks to sonar buoys launched by the U.S. Navy. In an attempt to create a sonar net that can detect enemy submarines, we are effectively polluting the entire ocean with sound. This sound, of course, interferes with both the communication and navigation of ocean creatures such as whales and dolphins.
On top of that, humans also use the oceans as dumping grounds for all sorts of toxic substances and experimental projects. For example, nuclear bombs are set off in the ocean or on top of small islands in order to test them in relatively low-population areas. Cruise ships, of course, regularly dump their human waste and toxic chemicals such as dry cleaning chemicals and photography development chemicals directly into the ocean, with no regard whatsoever for cleanliness or safety to ocean life.
There are many more ways in which the ocean is being polluted by mankind, but the bottom line is that we as human beings have not only destroyed the balanced ecosystem on planet earth and have taken great strides toward wiping out the rainforest, now we're also destroying the life-giving oceans of this planet with alarming speed. These Seaweed Rebels are now gathering for the first ever "Blue Vision Conference," held in Washington. At this conference they are working on ways to help publicize the sad state of ocean health caused by mankind, as well as ways to influence policymakers and private industry to better respect the health of our oceans.
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